Question

I am not sure if its a good idea, but i just thought it would be less tedious and much easier to declare variables on the fly using a for loop:

$val.$i = $row1[$i];. Now after trying this, this obviously isn’t the right thing to do. Is there anyway i can improve this and not declare separate variables.

Maybe this will give a clearer picture:

for($i = 1; $i < 5; $i++) {
    $val.$i = $row1[$i];
 } 

Now i want to achieve $val1 using $val.$i.

Answer 1

As others have posted, using an associative or 0-based array would be a far better implementation, but you can implement the solution just as you have requested using PHP’s variable variable names:

for ($i = 1; $i <= 5; $i++) 
{
  ${"val".$i} = "this is value " . $i;
}    

echo "$val1<br />$val2<br />$val3<br />$val4<br />$val5";

Will output:

this is value 1
this is value 2
this is value 3
this is value 4
this is value 5